Royce is an orphan who grew up on the streets of one of the dirtiest, lowest, crime-filled cities in Elan, which should give one somewhat of an insight into the way he turned out as an adult. His earliest memory is fighting a dog for a piece of bread when he was six, and life didn't get much better from there. Royce didn't live as a child; he survived, clawed his way to any semblance of stability, and each time he did, that stability was yanked out from underneath him. It's soured him to believe in the worst of people.
Royce doesn’t like to talk about himself much, but the books do give us some significant insights on Royce as a character through how other characters describe him. Arcadius, a character in the books who knows Royce decently well, mentions that Royce "... doesn't make friends easily, and doesn't make it easy to be his friend." That is absolutely true. Royce is paranoid, suspicious and distrustful of just about everything he comes across, especially other living beings. Royce does not trust people enough to turn his back to them, let alone attempt relationships. He does not like people, and he doesn't especially think highly of their intelligence, either. He's rude and blunt, not intentionally, but just because he doesn't really care what other people think of him. Similarly, he's not shy about letting people know what he thinks of them. Royce is quick to remind everybody he knows that people are always looking for the best way to serve themselves, especially to people like Hadrian, his much more optimistic partner. He expects people to be rude, self-serving, and ready to throw anybody under the bus in order to get what they want, and he expects this of all people, from children to adults to peasants to nobles. It's only natural that this sort of preconceived idea is going to make people more likely to dislike him off the bat, too, so it's sort of just a negative feedback loop. Royce expects people to be jerks, so he's a jerk first, and when they respond like someone normally does to unjustified hostility, he uses it as evidence that all people are selfish and awful.
Royce follows the same rules he thinks everybody else does. He defines right and wrong by the moment, by what is best for him -- wrong is everything else. If he’s hungry, he steals food. If someone is in his way and won’t move, he stabs them. If he feels he needs to lie, he does. Royce’s morality is simple in that way. He doesn’t believe right and wrong are objective things, that they vary from person to person, and trying to follow any sort of code is a waste of time. The world is cold and indifferent, and nothing Royce can do will change that, even if he wanted to. Which he absolutely doesn’t.
It’s not just people that Royce doesn’t think highly of, either. He doesn’t think much of himself. He doesn’t expect special treatment or sympathy from others, and doesn’t really think that he’s worth saving or that he needs saving. He's been dealt with a hand that's less than favorable, but he makes it work for him and doesn't pine for something better. Any pity is met with disdain and rolling of the eyes. Royce tries to stay detached from being a person with real feelings because he’s had hope taken away from him so many times he doesn’t think it’s worth it. The author of the series himself says, "Even Royce doesn't like to be Royce."
For Royce, his own personal existence and worth is just another unremarkable thing. The only reason that he's still alive is because he's "... just too stubborn to lie still and over the years had grown too mean to give in", according to Royce himself. For instance, the end of The Crown Tower, Royce and Hadrian are terribly injured, trying to make it back to a city so that they can patch themselves up. They jump off a tower, swim through a rushing river, and fend off a bunch of guards with bows, all while the two of them are sporting stab wounds. Royce gets through all of it without much complaining, and he doesn’t have much of a reason to other than he wants to finish the job and prove Arcadius wrong. Life kicks him into the mud, and he stands back up again, over and over, because... well, spite, essentially. He won't give in that easily. He’s not suicidal and he’s not looking for death, he’s just apathetic and pessimistic to the max about life.
It probably isn't surprising that someone this misanthropic prefers to be alone. Royce does, or so he says, but that doesn't make him less of a lonely person. He pushes people away from him intentionally, because he expects them to do it first, which means only the most stubborn people last. Hadrian Blackwater and Gwendolyn DeLancy in particular are the best examples of people who have lasted. These are the people he tries harder for, the people who have given him a little humanity. He tries to be better for the sake of Gwen and Hadrian, who are both incredibly positive influences in his life. While they don’t exist in his false memories, they’re still important parts of his makeup.
Hadrian is Royce's partner in crime of ten years, and knows Royce better than anybody else. He's cheerful, personable and hates to kill people, which means he's the exact opposite of Royce. The two balance each other out; Royce's cynicism weighs him down a little less when Hadrian is around, and Hadrian is far less likely to let his trusting nature get him murdered when Royce is around. Being Hadrian’s partner for years has softened Royce a little, and has made it easier for him to be a person rather than a demon. Despite the fact that they bicker like a married couple, they're the closest thing either one of them has to a brother. Royce would never admit it, but he'd take a bullet (or sword, in this case) for Hadrian.
Gwen, too, is important to Royce. Probably even more important than Hadrian. Gwen is the first people in his life to show any sort of romantic interest in Royce, and the poor guy has no idea what to do with it. She’s kind, patient, and loving, but her sarcastic and ruthless streak makes her absolutely perfect for someone like Royce. She’s not afraid to call him out on his bullshit, and she constantly reassures him that she wants him, no matter what or who he is. The love that she shows him is instrumental to Royce’s growth as a person to the point where Royce starts to measure most women he meets by the standard she’s set. He starts to see the world as a little less dark and awful when she’s around, and maybe thinks he’s worth something after all.
To give one an idea of how important Gwen is to Royce, there’s a part in The Rose and the Thorn where a government official by the name of Exeter beats Gwen for not knowing the answer to his question. Royce sees Gwen with all of her bruises. The rest of the book is devoted to Royce’s intricate plan of retaliation, which is to get Exeter alone, with all of his guards far away and distracted. Royce then proceeds to drag Exeter out to the town square, cut off most of his fingers, removes his eyes and ears, strings him up on a statue, and nails a sign that essentially reads “Don’t mess with the girls of Medford House” to Exeter’s chest with Exeter’s own dagger. This is even after Exeter pleads with Royce to not take his life because Exeter is trying to uncover a conspiracy to kill the king of Melengar - to which Royce responds that he’s not sure why he should care about that, and that Exeter really shouldn’t have hurt Gwen. Royce does not take kindly to people hurting those he loves (because he has so few people he does), to the point where not a lot else can sway him from murder.
But that’s in the second book, ten years before his current canon point. Royce grows a little more into a human, after twelve years of Gwen and Hadrian. Because of them, Royce is willing to listen to other opinions rather than just do things his own way. He kills less, has developed some sort of sense of right and wrong (instead of just doing whatever suits him best at the time), and is kinder. A little. He’s still a jerkass, especially to strangers, but he has the capability to trust because he has relationships that haven’t burned him. Royce can be loyal, and he can absolutely be sweet (in his own tsun sort of way). He’s got a soft spot for kids, especially ones that are struggling, and to some degree, disadvantaged women.
Not to say that the side of him that gruesomely murdered a noble to prove a point isn’t still there. For as much as Hadrian and Gwen have managed to soften Royce up, he’d still probably take out a kid or a woman if they crossed him. It’s just in his nature to be an assassin, to do what keeps him and the meager amount of people he cares about alive. And this is especially so, in a place like this, where he doesn’t have the memories of the people who have softened him up.
AU History:
Royce's false memories are not incredibly far off from his canon ones. He was born on Westerley - his mother died in childbirth and his father was nowhere to be found. He doesn't remember a whole lot of how he got to where he was - maybe he was adopted or looked after in an orphanage until he could make it to the undercity tunnels. There, he lived for years, working with the Tunnel Rats, making his way as a thief or whatever anybody needed him to be. During that time, he met his best friend, and they were inseparable. Even when his best friend found a girlfriend, they just added her to the fold. Unfortunately, in his early twenties, he got a little too cocky, and scared someone higher up in the gang into setting him up. That higher up set Royce up to murder his best friend's girlfriend - horrified, Royce tried to talk it out with his best friend, but his best friend refused to listen. A day later, Royce was picked up by the Company for being an Illegal - all of Royce's proper digital citizenship was destroyed, and Royce was sent to work on mining Yttrium.
Somehow, Royce survived his sentence. He's still not sure how.
But his sentence was up. Ten years, and he was still alive. They released him, and he was set back into Westerley with weak lungs and what one might refer to as a sour attitude. The man who set him up in the first place found a quick and sudden death - he wasn't expecting Royce to show up ever again, after that sentence. Royce spent months planning his revenge on both the man who set him up and his best friend, and executed the former quietly in the middle of the night. As of now, nobody knows that Royce is responsible for this.
Royce spent the next few months trying to figure out what to do. Eventually, he was approached by one of the lower level Nine members, a cousin of one of the families, who offered a large sum of money in order to do some dirty work for him. Starving and out of work, Royce agreed - and succeeded in the job. While he doesn't quite advertise himself, he is known as a man who can get whatever dirty deed you need done, for a reasonable price and a quick turnaround. He goes by Duster, where he can, where he needs to.
The most major difference from canon is he doesn’t know Gwen or Hadrian, here - this will make him far less likely to hold back on being a bad person, until he finds surrogate Gwen and Hadrians.
But the top echelon of society isn't exactly Royce's cup of tea. He's getting sick of this whole corrupted noble thing - but he'll keep doing it, because the cash is good and Royce likes to be able to afford to eat.
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Royce is an orphan who grew up on the streets of one of the dirtiest, lowest, crime-filled cities in Elan, which should give one somewhat of an insight into the way he turned out as an adult. His earliest memory is fighting a dog for a piece of bread when he was six, and life didn't get much better from there. Royce didn't live as a child; he survived, clawed his way to any semblance of stability, and each time he did, that stability was yanked out from underneath him. It's soured him to believe in the worst of people.
Royce doesn’t like to talk about himself much, but the books do give us some significant insights on Royce as a character through how other characters describe him. Arcadius, a character in the books who knows Royce decently well, mentions that Royce "... doesn't make friends easily, and doesn't make it easy to be his friend." That is absolutely true. Royce is paranoid, suspicious and distrustful of just about everything he comes across, especially other living beings. Royce does not trust people enough to turn his back to them, let alone attempt relationships. He does not like people, and he doesn't especially think highly of their intelligence, either. He's rude and blunt, not intentionally, but just because he doesn't really care what other people think of him. Similarly, he's not shy about letting people know what he thinks of them. Royce is quick to remind everybody he knows that people are always looking for the best way to serve themselves, especially to people like Hadrian, his much more optimistic partner. He expects people to be rude, self-serving, and ready to throw anybody under the bus in order to get what they want, and he expects this of all people, from children to adults to peasants to nobles. It's only natural that this sort of preconceived idea is going to make people more likely to dislike him off the bat, too, so it's sort of just a negative feedback loop. Royce expects people to be jerks, so he's a jerk first, and when they respond like someone normally does to unjustified hostility, he uses it as evidence that all people are selfish and awful.
Royce follows the same rules he thinks everybody else does. He defines right and wrong by the moment, by what is best for him -- wrong is everything else. If he’s hungry, he steals food. If someone is in his way and won’t move, he stabs them. If he feels he needs to lie, he does. Royce’s morality is simple in that way. He doesn’t believe right and wrong are objective things, that they vary from person to person, and trying to follow any sort of code is a waste of time. The world is cold and indifferent, and nothing Royce can do will change that, even if he wanted to. Which he absolutely doesn’t.
It’s not just people that Royce doesn’t think highly of, either. He doesn’t think much of himself. He doesn’t expect special treatment or sympathy from others, and doesn’t really think that he’s worth saving or that he needs saving. He's been dealt with a hand that's less than favorable, but he makes it work for him and doesn't pine for something better. Any pity is met with disdain and rolling of the eyes. Royce tries to stay detached from being a person with real feelings because he’s had hope taken away from him so many times he doesn’t think it’s worth it. The author of the series himself says, "Even Royce doesn't like to be Royce."
For Royce, his own personal existence and worth is just another unremarkable thing. The only reason that he's still alive is because he's "... just too stubborn to lie still and over the years had grown too mean to give in", according to Royce himself. For instance, the end of The Crown Tower, Royce and Hadrian are terribly injured, trying to make it back to a city so that they can patch themselves up. They jump off a tower, swim through a rushing river, and fend off a bunch of guards with bows, all while the two of them are sporting stab wounds. Royce gets through all of it without much complaining, and he doesn’t have much of a reason to other than he wants to finish the job and prove Arcadius wrong. Life kicks him into the mud, and he stands back up again, over and over, because... well, spite, essentially. He won't give in that easily. He’s not suicidal and he’s not looking for death, he’s just apathetic and pessimistic to the max about life.
It probably isn't surprising that someone this misanthropic prefers to be alone. Royce does, or so he says, but that doesn't make him less of a lonely person. He pushes people away from him intentionally, because he expects them to do it first, which means only the most stubborn people last. Hadrian Blackwater and Gwendolyn DeLancy in particular are the best examples of people who have lasted. These are the people he tries harder for, the people who have given him a little humanity. He tries to be better for the sake of Gwen and Hadrian, who are both incredibly positive influences in his life. While they don’t exist in his false memories, they’re still important parts of his makeup.
Hadrian is Royce's partner in crime of ten years, and knows Royce better than anybody else. He's cheerful, personable and hates to kill people, which means he's the exact opposite of Royce. The two balance each other out; Royce's cynicism weighs him down a little less when Hadrian is around, and Hadrian is far less likely to let his trusting nature get him murdered when Royce is around. Being Hadrian’s partner for years has softened Royce a little, and has made it easier for him to be a person rather than a demon. Despite the fact that they bicker like a married couple, they're the closest thing either one of them has to a brother. Royce would never admit it, but he'd take a bullet (or sword, in this case) for Hadrian.
Gwen, too, is important to Royce. Probably even more important than Hadrian. Gwen is the first people in his life to show any sort of romantic interest in Royce, and the poor guy has no idea what to do with it. She’s kind, patient, and loving, but her sarcastic and ruthless streak makes her absolutely perfect for someone like Royce. She’s not afraid to call him out on his bullshit, and she constantly reassures him that she wants him, no matter what or who he is. The love that she shows him is instrumental to Royce’s growth as a person to the point where Royce starts to measure most women he meets by the standard she’s set. He starts to see the world as a little less dark and awful when she’s around, and maybe thinks he’s worth something after all.
To give one an idea of how important Gwen is to Royce, there’s a part in The Rose and the Thorn where a government official by the name of Exeter beats Gwen for not knowing the answer to his question. Royce sees Gwen with all of her bruises. The rest of the book is devoted to Royce’s intricate plan of retaliation, which is to get Exeter alone, with all of his guards far away and distracted. Royce then proceeds to drag Exeter out to the town square, cut off most of his fingers, removes his eyes and ears, strings him up on a statue, and nails a sign that essentially reads “Don’t mess with the girls of Medford House” to Exeter’s chest with Exeter’s own dagger. This is even after Exeter pleads with Royce to not take his life because Exeter is trying to uncover a conspiracy to kill the king of Melengar - to which Royce responds that he’s not sure why he should care about that, and that Exeter really shouldn’t have hurt Gwen. Royce does not take kindly to people hurting those he loves (because he has so few people he does), to the point where not a lot else can sway him from murder.
But that’s in the second book, ten years before his current canon point. Royce grows a little more into a human, after twelve years of Gwen and Hadrian. Because of them, Royce is willing to listen to other opinions rather than just do things his own way. He kills less, has developed some sort of sense of right and wrong (instead of just doing whatever suits him best at the time), and is kinder. A little. He’s still a jerkass, especially to strangers, but he has the capability to trust because he has relationships that haven’t burned him. Royce can be loyal, and he can absolutely be sweet (in his own tsun sort of way). He’s got a soft spot for kids, especially ones that are struggling, and to some degree, disadvantaged women.
Not to say that the side of him that gruesomely murdered a noble to prove a point isn’t still there. For as much as Hadrian and Gwen have managed to soften Royce up, he’d still probably take out a kid or a woman if they crossed him. It’s just in his nature to be an assassin, to do what keeps him and the meager amount of people he cares about alive. And this is especially so, in a place like this, where he doesn’t have the memories of the people who have softened him up.
AU History:
Royce's false memories are not incredibly far off from his canon ones. He was born on Westerley - his mother died in childbirth and his father was nowhere to be found. He doesn't remember a whole lot of how he got to where he was - maybe he was adopted or looked after in an orphanage until he could make it to the undercity tunnels. There, he lived for years, working with the Tunnel Rats, making his way as a thief or whatever anybody needed him to be. During that time, he met his best friend, and they were inseparable. Even when his best friend found a girlfriend, they just added her to the fold. Unfortunately, in his early twenties, he got a little too cocky, and scared someone higher up in the gang into setting him up. That higher up set Royce up to murder his best friend's girlfriend - horrified, Royce tried to talk it out with his best friend, but his best friend refused to listen. A day later, Royce was picked up by the Company for being an Illegal - all of Royce's proper digital citizenship was destroyed, and Royce was sent to work on mining Yttrium.
Somehow, Royce survived his sentence. He's still not sure how.
But his sentence was up. Ten years, and he was still alive. They released him, and he was set back into Westerley with weak lungs and what one might refer to as a sour attitude. The man who set him up in the first place found a quick and sudden death - he wasn't expecting Royce to show up ever again, after that sentence. Royce spent months planning his revenge on both the man who set him up and his best friend, and executed the former quietly in the middle of the night. As of now, nobody knows that Royce is responsible for this.
Royce spent the next few months trying to figure out what to do. Eventually, he was approached by one of the lower level Nine members, a cousin of one of the families, who offered a large sum of money in order to do some dirty work for him. Starving and out of work, Royce agreed - and succeeded in the job. While he doesn't quite advertise himself, he is known as a man who can get whatever dirty deed you need done, for a reasonable price and a quick turnaround. He goes by Duster, where he can, where he needs to.
The most major difference from canon is he doesn’t know Gwen or Hadrian, here - this will make him far less likely to hold back on being a bad person, until he finds surrogate Gwen and Hadrians.
But the top echelon of society isn't exactly Royce's cup of tea. He's getting sick of this whole corrupted noble thing - but he'll keep doing it, because the cash is good and Royce likes to be able to afford to eat.